In the conventional sales environment, companies employ large numbers of salespeople to promote and sell their products in particular territories and regions. These mobile sales force representatives can be responsible for hundreds and possibly thousands of customers. Furthermore, while not only handling existing customers' accounts, mobile sales force representatives are continuously encouraged by their employers to increase sales and add new accounts. The ability for a mobile sales force representative to balance the workload and be an efficient salesperson can be extremely difficult.
To assist their sales force, companies maintain large amounts of information about their products and their customers so they can pass it along to their sales force. In a typical sales context, a mobile sales force representative can access this information by contacting a technician at a call center run by the company. This information consists of details about new products, the particular customer's historical information, and other relevant sales information. This type of system can be inefficient as the vendor has to spend money to employ individuals to monitor the calls and the mobile sales force representatives are spending valuable time on the phone trying to collect what can amount to a large volume of information about a product and/or customer.
Another problem that currently plagues mobile sales force representatives is the managing of customer communications. For large customers that buy and sell huge volumes of products, multiple mobile sales force representatives may be necessary to handle the customer's demands. Therefore, it is not uncommon for certain tasks to be performed multiple times or not at all, as the mobile sales force representatives have difficulty in determining what the other representatives are doing or have done with regard to a particular customer.
In addition, for both sales and customer communications information, there is a delay on how quickly this information is fed back into the company's databases. In a conventional approach, the mobile sales force representatives are required to complete written reports or checklists summarizing client meeting or filling out purchase orders for new sales orders. In turn, this information must be phoned in, mailed, or hand-delivered back to the company in order for them to enter the information into the appropriate databases. Especially for customer comments, this information may not be available until after a subsequent customer contact; therefore, leading to continued inefficiencies in supporting the customer's demands.
Furthermore, mobile sales force representatives have typically been hesitant when it comes to adopting new technological innovations to assist them in their jobs. Many mobile sales force representatives either ignore technology innovations all together and rely on their own skill or they become frustrated when they must adapt to working with multiple devices such as cell phones, laptops, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDA), etc.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a system and method of providing relevant sales context information that would enable vendors to reduce cost of operations, increase productivity of their mobile sales forces, and drive improved efficiencies throughout.